English is making steady inroads upon French as the language of diplomacy and of other international intercourse, and upon German as the language of science. In the former case, to be sure, French still offers a sturdy resistance. “There are certain respects,” says Dr. Herbert Newhard Shenton in “Cosmopolitan Conversation,”19 “in which the international-conference movement is characteristically French. This does not apply to all classes of interests in the movement, but does apply to the movement as a whole. The favored rendezvous of conferences are in France or in French-speaking countries; more of the permanent headquarters are located in France than in any other country, and many others are located in French-speaking countries.” Thus French “still remains the preferred official language of international conferences.” But certainly not by the old wide margin. Of the 330 international organizations dealt with in Dr. Shenton’s book, 282 have one or more official languages, and among these 78% include French and 58% English. A century ago, or even half a century ago, the percentages would have been nearer 100% and 25%. Perhaps the turn of the tide came with the Versailles Conference. At that historic gathering the two representatives of the English-speaking countries, Wilson and Lloyd George, had no French, whereas the French spokesman, Clemenceau, spoke English fluently — incidentally, with a strong American accent.20 Thus English became the language of negotiation, and it has been heard round council tables with increasing frequency ever since.
All over the Far East it has been a lingua franca since the Eighteenth Century, at first in the barbarous guise of Pidgin English, but of late in increasingly seemly forms, often with an American admixture. In Japan, according to the Belgian consul-general at Yokohama, it is now “indispensable for all Europeans. One can do without Japanese, but would be lost without English. It is the business language.”21 In China, according to Dr. Lim-boon Keng, president of Amoy University, “we have practically adopted English,” and in India, though but 2,500,000 natives can read and write it, it not only competes with Hindi in business, but is fast becoming the language of politics. Those Indians who know it, says Sir John A. R. Marriott22 “are the only persons who are politically conscious. Indian nationalism is almost entirely the product of English education; the medium of all political discussion is necessarily English.” It is, adds R. C. Goffin,23 “the readiest means of obtaining (a) employment under the government; (b) employment in commercial houses of any standing, whether Indian or foreign; (c) command of the real lingua franca of the country — for Hindustani is of very little use south of the Central Provinces; (d) knowledge of Western ideas, both ancient and modern.… English in other ways has shown itself a useful instrument for a country setting out to learn the habits of democracy. It is most convenient for the politician, for example, to be able to employ a language with only one word (instead of three or even four) for you.… There is no country today where a foreign language has been so thoroughly domesticated as has English in India.”24
Altogether, it is probable that English is now spoken as a second language by at least 20,000,000 persons throughout the world25 — very often, to be sure, badly, but nevertheless understandably. It has become a platitude that one may go almost anywhere with no other linguistic equipment, and get along almost as well as in large areas of New York City. Here, for example, is the testimony of an English traveler:
It was only on reaching Italy that I began to fully realize this wonderful thing, that for nearly six weeks, on a German ship, in a journey of nearly 10,000 miles, we had heard little of any language but English!
In Japan most of the tradespeople spoke English. At Shanghai, at Hong Kong, at Singapore, at Penang, at Colombo, at Suez, at Port Said — all the way home to the Italian ports, the language of all the ship’s traffic, the language of such discourse as the passengers held with natives, most of the language on board ship itself, was English.
The German captain of our ship spoke English more often than German. All his officers spoke English.
The Chinese man-o’-war’s men who conveyed the Chinese prince on board at Shanghai received commands and exchanged commands with our German sailors in English. The Chinese mandarins in their conversations with the ships’ officers invariably spoke English. They use the same ideographs in writing as the Japanese, but to talk to our Japanese passengers they had to speak English. Nay, coming as they did from various provinces of the Empire, where the language gready differs, they found it most convenient in conversation among themselves to speak English!26
And here is that of an American:
In Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Munich, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, nearly all of Switzerland, and in such resorts as Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Carlsbad, Deauville, Biarritz, Vichy, St.-Jean-de-Luz, Lake Como, and the entire Riviera, it is difficult to find a first-class hotel where they are willing to permit you to hear the language of the country. One might think the employees were required to abjure their own tongue.27
My own experience may be added for whatever it is worth. I have visited, since the World War, sixteen countries in Europe, five in Africa, three in Asia and three in Latin-America, beside a large miscellany of islands, but I don’t remember ever encountering a situation that English could not resolve. I have heard it spoken with reasonable fluency in a Moroccan bazaar, in an Albanian fishing-port, and on the streets of Istanbul. During the war the German army of occupation in Lithuania used it as a means of communicating with the local Jews, many of whom had been in America. In part, of course, its spread has been due to the extraordinary dispersion of the English-speaking peoples. They have been the greatest travelers of modern times, and the most adventurous merchants, and the most assiduous colonists. Moreover, they have been, on the whole, poor linguists, and so they have dragged their language with them, and forced it upon the human race. Wherever it has met with serious competition, as with French in Canada, with Spanish along our southwestern border, and with Dutch in South Africa, they have compromised with its local rival only reluctantly, and then sought every opportunity, whether fair or unfair, to break the pact. If English is the language of the sea, it is largely because there are more English ships on the sea than any other kind, and English ship-captains refuse to learn what they think of as the barbaric gibberishes of Hamburg, Rio and Marseilles.
But there is more to the matter than this. English, brought to close quarters with formidable rivals, has won very often, not by mere force of numbers and intransigence, but by the weight of its intrinsic merit. “In riches, good sense and terse convenience (Reich-tum, Vernunft und gedrängter Fuge),” said the eminent Jakob Grimm nearly a century ago,28 “no other of the living languages may be put beside it.” To which the eminent Otto Jespersen adds: “It seems to me positively and expressively masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man, and has very little childish or feminine about it.”29 Dr. Jespersen then goes on to explain the origin and nature of this “masculine” air: it is grounded chiefly upon clarity, directness and force. He says:
The English consonants are well defined; voiced and voiceless consonants stand over against each other in neat symmetry, and they are, as a rule, clearly and precisely pronounced. You have none of those indistinct or half-slurred consonants that abound in Danish, for instance (such as those in hade, hage, livlig), where you hardly know whether it is a consonant or a vowel-glide that meets the ear. The only thing that might be compared to this in English is the r when not followed by a vowel, but then this has really given up definitely all pretensions to the rank of a consonant, and is (in the pronunciation of the South of England)30 either frankly a vowel (as in here) or else nothing at all (in hart, etc.). Each English consonant belongs distinctly to its own type, a t is a t, and a k is a k, and there is an end. There is much less modification of a consonant by the surrounding vowels than in some other languages; thus none of that palatalization of consonants which gives an insinuating grace to such languages as Russian. The vowel sounds, too, are comparatively independent of their surround
ings; and in this respect the language now has deviated widely from the character of Old English, and has become more clear-cut and distinct in its phonetic structure, although, to be sure, the diphthongization of most long vowels (in ale, whole, eel, who, phonetically eil, houl, ijl, huw) counteracts in some degree this impression of neatness and evenness.
Dr. Jespersen then proceeds to consider certain peculiarities of English grammar and syntax, and to point out the simplicity and forcefulness of the everyday English vocabulary. The grammatical baldness of the language, he argues (against the old tradition in philology), is one of the chief sources of its vigor. He says:
Where German has, for instance, alle diejenigen wilden tiere, die dort leben, so that the plural idea is expressed in each word separately (apart, of course, from the adverb), English has all the wild animals that live there, where all, the article, the adjective, and the relative pronoun are alike incapable of receiving any mark of the plural number; the sense is expressed with the greatest clearness imaginable, and all the unstressed endings -e and -en, which make most German sentences so drawling, are avoided.
The prevalence of very short words in English, and the syntactical law which enables it to dispense with the definite article in many constructions “where other languages think it indispensable, e.g., ‘life is short,’ ‘dinner is ready’ ” — these are further marks of vigor and clarity, according to Dr. Jespersen. “ ‘First come, first served,’ ” he says, “is much more vigorous than the French ‘Premier venu, premier moulu’ or ‘Le premier venu engrène,’ the German ‘Wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst,’ and especially than the Danish ‘Den der kommer først til mølle, far først malet.’ ” Again, there is the superior logical sense of English — the arrangement of words, not according to grammatical rules, but according to their meaning. “In English,” says Dr. Jespersen, “an auxiliary verb does not stand far from its main verb, and a negative will be found in the immediate neighborhood of the word it negatives, generally the verb (auxiliary). An adjective nearly always stands before its noun; the only really important exception is where there are qualifications added to it which draw it after the noun so that the whole complex serves the purpose of a relative clause.” In English, the subject almost invariably precedes the verb and the object follows after. Once Dr. Jespersen had his pupils determine the percentage of sentences in various authors in which this order was observed. They found that even in English poetry it was seldom violated; the percentage of observances in Tennyson’s poetry ran to 88. But in the poetry of Holger Drachmann, the Dane, it fell to 61, in Anatole France’s prose to 66, in Gabriele d’Annunzio to 49, and in the poetry of Goethe to 30. All these things make English clearer and more logical than other tongues. It is, says Dr. Jespersen, “a methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency and is opposed to any attempt to narrow life by police regulations and strict rules either of grammar or of lexicon.” In these judgments another distinguished Danish philologist, Prof. Thomsen, agrees fully.
Several years ago an American philologian, Dr. Walter Kirkconnell, undertook to count the number of syllables needed to translate the Gospel of Mark into forty Indo-European languages, ranging from Persian and Hindi to English and French.31 He found that, of all of them, English was the most economical, for it took but 29,000 syllables to do the job, whereas the average for all the Teutonic languages was 32,650, that for the Slavic group 36,500, that for the Latin group 40,200, and that for the Indo-Iranian group (Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit, etc.) 43,100. It is commonly believed that French is a terse language, and compared to its cousins, Italian and Spanish, it actually is, but compared to English it is garrulous, for it takes 36,000 syllables to say what English says in 29,000.32 Dr. Kirkconnell did not undertake to determine the average size of the syllables he counted, but I am confident that if he had done so he would have found those of English shorter, taking one with another, than those of most other languages. “If it had not been for the great number of long foreign, especially Latin, words,” says Dr. Jespersen, “English would have approached the state of such monosyllabic languages as Chinese.” “They are marvellous,” says Salvador de Madariaga,33 “those English monosyllables. Their fidelity is so perfect that one is tempted to think English words are the right and proper names which acts are meant to have, and all other words are pitiable failures.34 How could one improve upon splash, smash, ooze, shriek, slush, glide, squeak, coo? Is not the word sweet a kiss in itself, and what could suggest a more peremptory obstacle than stop?” “The Spanish critic,” says Dean Inge, “is quite right in calling attention to the vigor of English monosyllables. No other European language has so many.”35
For these and other reasons English strikes most foreigners as an extraordinarily succinct, straightforward and simple tongue — in some of its aspects, in fact, almost as a kind of baby-talk. When they proceed from trying to speak it to trying to read and write it they are painfully undeceived, for its spelling is almost as irrational as that of French or Swedish, but so long as they are content to tackle it viva voce they find it loose and comfortable, and at the same time very precise. The Russian, coming into it burdened with his six cases, his three genders, his palatalized consonants and his complicated pronouns, luxuriates in a language which has only two cases, no grammatical gender, a set of consonants which (save only r) maintain their integrity in the face of any imaginable rush of vowels, and an outfit of pronouns so simple that one of them suffices to address the President of the United States or a child in arms, a lovely female creature in camera or the vast hordes of the radio. And the German, the Scandinavian, the Italian, and the Frenchman, though the change for them is measurably less sharp, nevertheless find it grateful, too. Only the Spaniard brings with him a language comparable to English for logical clarity, and even the Spaniard is afflicted with grammatic gender.
The huge English vocabulary is likely to make the foreigner uneasy, but he soon finds that nine-tenths of it lies safely buried in the dictionaries, and is never drawn upon for everyday use. On examining 400,000 words of writing by 2500 Americans Dr. Leonard P. Ayres found that the 50 commonest words accounted for more than half the total number of words used, that 250 more accounted for another 25%, and that 1000 accounted for 90%.36 That the language may be spoken intelligibly with even less than 1000 words has been argued by Dr. C. K. Ogden, the English psychologist. Dr. Ogden believes that 850 are sufficient for all ordinary purposes and he has devised a form of simplified English, called by him Basic (from British American Scientific International Commercial), which uses no more. Of this number, 600 are nouns, 100 are adjectives, 100 are “adjectival opposites,” 30 are verbs, and the rest are particles, etc. Two hundred of the nouns consist of the names of common objects, e.g., bottle, brick, ear, potato and umbrella; the rest are the names of familiar groups and concepts, e.g., people, music, crime, loss and weather. No noun is admitted (save for the names of a few common objects) “which can be defined in not more than ten other words.” The reduction of verbs to 30 is effected by taking advantage of one of the prime characteristics of English (and especially of American) — its capacity for getting an infinity of meanings out of a single verb by combining it with simple modifiers. Consider, for example, the difference (in American) between to get, to get going, to get by, to get on, to get on to, to get off, to get ahead of, to get wise, to get religion and to get over. Why should a foreigner be taught to say that he has disembarked from a ship? Isn’t it sufficient for him to say that he got off? And why should he be taught to say that he has recovered from the flu, or escaped the police, or ascended a stairway, or boarded a train, or obtained a job? Isn’t it enough to say that he has got over the first, got away from the second, got up the third, got on the fourth, and simply got the fifth? The fundamental verbs of Basic are ten in number — come, go, put, take, give, get, make, keep, let and do. “Every time,” says Dr. Ogden (he is writing in Basic), “you put
together the name of one of these ten simple acts (all of which are free to go in almost any direction) with the name of one of the twenty directions or positions in space, you are making a verb.” In addition to its 850 words, of course, Basic is free to take in international words that are universally understood, e.g., coffee, engineer, tobacco, police and biology, and to add words specially pertinent to the matter in hand, e.g., chloride and platinum in a treatise on chemistry. It is interesting to note that of the fifty international words listed by Dr. Ogden, no less than seven are Americanisms, new or old, viz., cocktail, jazz, radio, phonograph, telegram, telephone and tobacco, and that one more, check, is listed in American spelling.37
Whether Basic will make any progress remains to be seen.38 It has been criticized on various grounds. For one thing, its vocabulary shows some serious omissions — for example, the numerals — and for another, its dependence upon verb-phrases may confuse rather than help the foreigner, whose difficulties with prepositions are notorious.39 There is also the matter of spelling, always a cruel difficulty to a foreigner tackling English. But Dr. Ogden waives this difficulty away. For one thing, he argues that his list of 850 words, being made up mainly of the commonest coins of speech, avoids most of them; for another thing, he believes that the very eccentricity of the spelling of some of the rest will help the foreigner to remember them. Every schoolboy, as we all know, seizes upon such bizarre forms as through, straight and island with fascinated eagerness, and not infrequently he masters them before he masters such phonetically spelled words as first, tomorrow and engineer. In my own youth, far away in the dark backward and abysm of time, the glory of every young American was phthisic, with the English proper name, Cholmondeley, a close second. Dr. Ogden proposes to let the foreigners attempting Basic share the joy of hunting down such basilisks. For the rest, he leaves the snarls of English spelling to the judgments of a just God, and the natural tendency of all things Anglo-Saxon to move toward an ultimate perfection. Unluckily, his Basic now has a number of competitors on its own ground,40 and it must also meet the competition of the so-called universal languages, beginning with Volapük (1880) and Esperanto (1887) and running down to Idiom Neural (1898), Ido (1907), Interlingua (1908), and Novial, invented by Dr. Jespersen (1928).41 Some of these languages, and notably Esperanto and Novial, show a great ingenuity, and all of them have enthusiastic customers who believe that they are about to be adopted generally. There are also persons who hold that some such language is bound to come in soon or late, though remaining doubtful about all those proposed so far — for example, Dr. Shenton, who closes his “Cosmopolitan Conversation,” by proposing that the proponents of Esperanto, Interlingua, Novial and the rest come together in a conference of their own, and devise “a neutral, synthetic, international auxiliary language” that will really conquer the world.
American Language Page 84
